FreedomTalks

Andrew Sullivan isn’t convinced by Jon Cohn’s argument that government-run health care won’t have any serious effect on medical innovation. Taking issue with Cohn’s idea that “The goal is to reduce our spending moderately and carefully,” Sullivan writes:
And why should we reduce spending at all if we don’t want to and the market reflects it? [...]

Why not create a government board to centralize decision-making for medical innovation?  TNR’s Jonathan Cohn makes the case:
All of them would establish independent advisory boards, staffed by leading medical experts, to help decide whether proposed new treatments actually provide clinical value.
…Of course, the idea of involving the government in these decisions is anathema to many [...]

Our friend Ramesh Ponnuru from National Review puts forward an interesting proposition in Time magazine. Republican proposals on health care policy are radical. He elaborates that Democrats are incremental in their approach to buttress a failing status quo with additional governmental support programs.
Ponnuru explains that the GOP is trying to move away from [...]

Nick Gillespie at Reason points us to this great short by Stuart Browning on the perils of government-run health care.

What’s great about this is that Browning has done more than recap the basic problems with socialized medicine; he’s actually gone out and found the human side of the story, taking a (painful, I think) look [...]

It’s been pretty obvious for a while that the Democrats’ S-CHIP fight has been almost entirely for show, a little song and dance routine designed to suggest that opponents of the bill don’t care about health care for children. And now it seems that was the plan all along. Here’s Allan Hubbard, director [...]

In today’s New York Times, Harvard University economics professor-and author of my university’s economics textbooks, Greg Mankiw, discusses the Left’s most commonly used data to support their desire for socialized health care, and why they’re misleading.
Mankiw discusses 3 main statements that could be heard on any Hillary Clinton TV spot:

STATEMENT 1: The United [...]

Peggy Noonan notes that Hillary Clinton may have polished some of her political operations, but she’s still stuck in the early 90s:

The story is that she talked about policy. Not talking points, but policy. In talking about it she seemed, for the first time, to be revealing what’s inside.
It was startling. It’s 1993 in there. [...]

Cost-containment. It’s a topic that comes up pretty regularly when discussing America’s health-care system.  It’s too expensive here! Medical spending is out of control! Etc, etc.  But when liberal health care advocates talk about cost-containment, they rarely seem to recognize what’s really driving up medical spending: medical care, especially that which makes us medical technology’s [...]

One of the problems people on the right have with health care is looking as if they’re defending the current system as some sort of pure, perfect marvel. It’s not.  One of the biggest problems that health insurance is currently tied to employment because of the tax breaks employers get on health insurance purchases.  That’s [...]

Here’s President Bush out speaking at a recent event.  The message isn’t exactly subtle.

Now here’s the Washington Post this morning on how the administration is handling the ongonig S-CHIP brouhaha:
Bush administration officials yesterday voiced conciliation, suggesting the president could accept legislation that would expand the program by about $20 billion over five years, far bigger [...]